A new approach to understanding the nature of ethics and ethical decision making, not only in the context of business, but also in other life contexts.

This paper examines the relationship between the KK principle and the epistemological theses of externalism and internalism. In particular we examine arguments from Okasha :80–86, 2013) and Greco :169–197, 2014) which deny that we can derive the denial of the KK principle from externalism.

According to recently influential conceptions of public reasoning, citizens have the right to demand of each other ‘public justifications’ for controversial political action. On this view, only arguments that all reasonable citizens can affirm from within their diverse ethical standpoints can count as legitimate justifications for political action. Both proponents and critics often assume that the case for this expectation derives from the special justificatory burden created by the systematically coercive character of political action. This paper challenges that assumption. While (...) conceding that citizens who propose to deploy the coercive apparatus of the state to enforce controversial legislation owe their fellows a justification that overcomes the strong presumption against coercing agents, it denies that this consideration can explain why public justifications are also required. Having argued that the public justification requirement is not among the justification conditions for public coercion, the paper then proposes an alternative rationale for the expectation that political action be publicly justified. On this alternative, the case for the public justification requirement depends on democratic citizens’ standing as legislative co-authors, and not on considerations having to do with their liability as private individuals to coercion at the hands of the state. (shrink)

I argue that the constitutive aim of belief and the constitutive aim of science are both knowledge. The ‘aim of belief’, understood as the correctness conditions of belief, is to be identified with the product of properly functioning cognitive systems. Science is an institution that is the social functional analogue of a cognitive system, and its aim is the same as that of belief. In both cases it is knowledge rather than true belief that is the product of proper functioning.

Recent theoretical models suggest that the difference between human and nonhuman primate life-history patterns may be due to a reliance on complex foraging strategies requiring extensive learning. These models predict that children should reach adult levels of efficiency faster when foraging is cognitively simple. We test this prediction with data on Meriam fishing, spearfishing, and shellfishing efficiency. For fishing and spearfishing, which are cognitively difficult, we can find no significant amount of variability in return rates because of experiential factors correlated (...) with age. However, for shellfish collecting, which is relatively easy to learn, there are strong age-related effects on efficiency. Children reach adult efficiency more quickly in fishing as compared to shellfish collecting, probably owing to the size and strength constraints of the latter. (shrink)

I argue that the naturalism of Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," which he himself later ignored, is worthy of rehabilitation. A naturalistic conception of paradigms is ripe for development with the tools of cognitive science. As a consequence a naturalistic understanding of world-change and incommensurability is also viable.

This paper shows that the history of clinical medicine in the eighteenth century supports Paul Hoyningen-Huene’s thesis that there is a correlation between science and systematicity. For example, James Jurin’s assessment of the safety of variolation as a protection against smallpox adopted a systematic approach to the assessment of interventions in order to eliminate sources of cognitive bias that would compromise inquiry. Clinical medicine thereby became a science. I use this confirming instance to motivate a broader hypothesis, that systematicity is (...) a distinctive feature of science because systematicity is required by processes of knowledge generation that go beyond our everyday cognitive capacities, and these processes are required to produce knowledge of the kinds that science aims at. (shrink)

Let us call a property that is essentially dispositional a potency.1 David Armstrong thinks that potencies do not exist. All sparse properties are essentially categorical, where sparse properties are the explanatory properties of the type science seeks to discover. An alternative view, but not the only one, is that all sparse properties are potencies or supervene upon them. In this paper I shall consider the differences between these views, in particular the objections Armstrong raises against potencies.

‘We were driving through Death Valley, an American-Australian and two Aussies, taking the scenic route from Las Vegas to Santa Cruz.’ This multi-voiced account of multispecies encounters along a highway takes up the challenge of playful and humorous writing that is as well deeply serious and theoretically provocative. Our travels brought us into what Donna Haraway calls the contact zone: a region of recognition and response. The contact zone is a place of significant questions: ‘Who are you, and so who (...) are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?’ Events were everything in this ecology of play, in which the movements of all the actors involved the material field in its entirety. We were brought into dances of approach and withdrawal, dances emerging directly, to paraphrase Brian Massumi, from the dynamic relation between a myriad of charged particles. (shrink)

Objective This work disentangles moral tolerance from moral relativism and reveals their distinct personological meanings. Both constructs have long been of interest to moral philosophers, moral psychologists, and everyday people, and they may play prominent roles in the feasibility of modern diverse societies. However, they have been criticized as devaluing morality and as producing overly permissive societies. Moreover, although they lack necessary conceptual implications for each other, they are easily (and often) conflated. -/- Method Three studies included nine samples (total (...) N > 3,200, 40%–50% female, Mage = 38–40, 83% white). Participants completed (online) new measures of moral tolerance and moral relativism, along with measures of 40 additional constructs. -/- Results Results reveal robust psychometric quality of the new measures (the Moral Relativism Scale and the Moral Tolerance Scale), demonstrate that the constructs are empirically overlapping but separable, and highlight their distinct personological networks. Moral relativism was associated with liberal political views and a lowered valuing/enacting of moral values. Moral tolerance was weakly associated with liberal political views but was strongly related to a broad range of both liberal and conservative moral values. -/- Conclusion This work yields new tools for investigating moral character, and it reveals the differential meaning of two important moral constructs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry by Pramit ChaudhuriMartin T. DinterPramit Chaudhuri. The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xvi + 386 pp. Cloth, $74.We are all fighting our own demons, but some of us—so Chaudhuri tells us—are even fighting our own gods. Accordingly, a wide range of theomachs and their representation in classical literature fills the ranks (...) of this excellent book that will certainly elbow its way onto Mt. Olympus to sit comfortably next to divine Feeney (1991 and 1998) and sublime Hardie (1986 and 1993). Indeed, Chaudhuri transcends the scope of Feeney (1991) by including not only Senecan (and Attic) tragedy but also texts and contexts ranging from panegyric to philosophy and from lyric to historiography.Chaudhuri’s book falls into three parts. Its first three chapters cover theomachy in Greek poetry (Homer and Attic tragedy), as well as the development of theomachy in Augustan epic, with chapters on Lucretius and Vergil and Ovid. Here, Chaudhuri introduces some of the main patterns and contexts that will be developed in later imperial poetry. Chaudhuri also states clearly what will not be covered here at length: the voyage myths of the Odyssey and the Argonauts, Aristophanes’ Birds, and the (pseudo-) Aeschylean Prometheus Bound. Part 2 covers Neronian literature with Seneca’s Hercules Furens and Lucan, while Part 3 focuses on the Flavian era, with Silius and Statius. Statius’ Capaneus forms a highpoint amongst the theomachs and thus deservedly receives extra attention. Chaudhuri rounds off the Flavian section with a chapter on the politics [End Page 177] of theomachy, in which he samples theomachy as a trope for the confrontation between subject and ruler, ruler and god, rival emperors and the confrontation of dynasties. After all, the Flavian poets had witnessed the principate develop over time, the struggles for the throne, and the rise and fall of dynasties. This is followed by a titillating epilogue showcasing how the themes developed in the previous chapters that breach the divide between mortal and immortal (such as fame, equanimity, skepticism, and poetic and imperial apotheosis) echo through the centuries. Rarely, however, do we find simple didactic moralism. Instead, “the theomach is instrumental in generating a dialogue on the broader symbolism of fighting the gods, its stakes and implications” (323). Chaudhuri can but hint at the rich afterlife of the theomach across Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a subject that would fill a second volume. He nevertheless whets the reader’s appetite by pointing to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Dante’s Inferno, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, as well as a host of epigraphs to each chapter, and concludes with a glance at the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Richard Dawkins versus God, and modern physicists’ search for a God particle.Chaudhuri sets the volume off by contrasting theomachy with gigantomachy. While the feats of the Giants “remain far distant in time from the activities of humankind … the theomach speaks the language of humanity … offering a richer context for his radical aspirations and … inviting the audience to adopt an alternative view on the theological status quo” (5). He also places theomachy in its cultural context when he follows Momigliano’s (1984) suggestion that under Augustus poetry replaced antiquarianism and philosophy as the primary genre in which to think about the gods. The figure of the contemptor divum (despiser of the gods) thus comes to embody the contrast between piety and impiety which itself is grounded in the empirical basis of Roman religion. But rather than testing methods of communication with the divine, as the Romans so often did with divinatory practices and ritual protocols, the contemptor divum tackles the question of whether it is possible to know the divine at all and whether the gods even exist. “By placing these conflicts at the heart of their works, the epic poets expanded the cultural conversation to include the testing of the divine in the Romans’ attempts to make sense of the epistemological, theological, and political concerns pertaining... (shrink)

How should those who value reasonable pluralism navigate ethical and epistemological challenges related to speech and inquiry in higher education? We propose the ethical pursuit of public knowledge as a guiding vision for public colleges and universities with the understanding that other institutions will serve different purposes. The ethical criterion of mutuality calls for engagement across difference and reciprocal recognition of others’ basic equality and liberty. To maintain epistemic legitimacy, knowledge-production processes in these institutions should elevate ideas warranted by public (...) reasons that have withstood rigorous critical scrutiny above those that have not. Some forms of speech—including the expression of extremist views on both the Right and the Left—will prove unreasonable and incompatible with the guiding vision and should therefore be marginalized within these institutions. (shrink)

Let’s suppose all the rules of physics will change, but, before the change, we finally figured out everything there was to be figured out about physics. This means that we achieved pragmatic completeness at that point. It’s not a universal Platonic completeness, but everything there was to be expressed about the physics at that moment was expressed.

Kant and Descartes followed an extreme clever, secure way of reasoning. For them, there must be a world of differences, or of movement, before we can extract anything (ideas, laws, concepts, etc.) from the world. For Kant, these “changes” that secure the possibility of knowledge were the ones we can measure with the categories of space and time. While, for Descartes, since there exist two things: “me” and “the world”, we can say knowledge is possible. But I think we can (...) extract a more abstract, general principle from the similarities between both Descartes and Kant’s mobilist tendency. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The “A Posteriori/A Priori” and “Analytic/Synthetic” Distinctions Synthetic A Priori Judgments A Priori Elements Analytic and Synthetic Method The Empirical/Transcendental Distinction Conclusion.

This paper questions the claim, advanced persuasively by Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti, that political corruption should primarily be understood as a “deficit of office accountability.” On the one hand, it identifies some ambiguities internal to their theory; these suggest that it underestimates the role of self-serving motives in corruption and overemphasizes the perversion of institutional mandates. On the other hand, it describes a form of “passive corruption” that their theory cannot easily accommodate. Passive corruption, I argue, consists in (...) an excess, rather than a deficit, of “office accountability” and typically arises when different institutions come into conflict with each other. (shrink)

Many voices today call for a profound rethinking of European identity. If we wish to answer their call, however, it is necessary to start with a reconsideration of the notion of boundaries, particularly as they are at work in the Mediterranean region. The knowledge and cultural values of the Mediterranean may be the driving force able to overcome the impasse from which Europe seems unable to free itself. This volume focuses on the opportunity to employ Mediterranean knowledge and cultural values (...) as a stimulus for the review of European policies, in the interest of creating a solid bridge between different cultural legacies and over the daunting challenges of our shared future. This means being able to stay simul outside and inside the borders, within and beyond the un-limit; looking for an image of Europe which finally stops thinking about the Mediterranean as its internal vulnus, as its lesion and contamination. (shrink)

Metamorphoses of Satan.--The obligation of being immortal.--The spiritual vagabond.--The moral zodiac.--The fighting chance for peace.--Absolution for heretics.--Providence by accident.

Humans are powerful and clever, and also more ignorant than they know. As a result, they too often fail to acknowledge or even recognize their limitations, and are more arrogant than humble regarding their capabilities. Education that explicitly recognizes and addresses the context of science and technology, their inherent values and ethical implications and concerns, and their problematic as well as beneficial impacts can potentially rescue the human species from itself.

This paper commences by making a case for a naturalized approach to knowledge‐first epistemology. On this basis it then goes on to describe and defend a naturalized, functionalist account of group knowledge. It then contrasts this with Jennifer Lackey's (2021) account of the epistemological status of groups.

This volume contains essays by five British philosophers and one Swedish philosopher working in metaphysics and in particular metaphysics as it relates to the philosophy of science. These philosophers are the core of a tight network of European philosophers of science and metaphysicians and their essays have evolved as a result of workshops in Lund, Edinburgh, and Athens.

Name der Zeitschrift: Journal of Ancient History Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 1 Seiten: 66-92.

Epistemology in modern times has been much influenced by the growth of the mathematical theory of probability. The reverse influence is less obvious, but perhaps equally important. This interrelation affords, moreover, an excellent example of the way philosophic ideas, while directing attention in one fruitful line of inquiry, at the same time may inhibit other discoveries until long overdue.

The reply to Kanterian offers a rebuttal of his central criticisms. It reaffirms the difference between Kant's arguments in the Aesthetic and at B 148-9; it rejects the alleged error of logic in Fischer's (and my) arguments; and it rejects Kanterian's reading of passages in the Preface (A xx-xxii) and of the Amphiboly. Beyond these specific points Kanterian assumes that Kant's project in the first Critique cannot be understood as a and so begs the question at issue.

This study suggests a new approach to EEG data classification by exploring the idea of using evolutionary computation to both select useful discriminative EEG features and optimise the topology of Artificial Neural Networks. An evolutionary algorithm is applied to select the most informative features from an initial set of 2550 EEG statistical features. Optimisation of a Multilayer Perceptron is performed with an evolutionary approach before classification to estimate the best hyperparameters of the network. Deep learning and tuning with Long Short-Term (...) Memory are also explored, and Adaptive Boosting of the two types of models is tested for each problem. Three experiments are provided for comparison using different classifiers: one for attention state classification, one for emotional sentiment classification, and a third experiment in which the goal is to guess the number a subject is thinking of. The obtained results show that an Adaptive Boosted LSTM can achieve an accuracy of 84.44%, 97.06%, and 9.94% on the attentional, emotional, and number datasets, respectively. An evolutionary-optimised MLP achieves results close to the Adaptive Boosted LSTM for the two first experiments and significantly higher for the number-guessing experiment with an Adaptive Boosted DEvo MLP reaching 31.35%, while being significantly quicker to train and classify. In particular, the accuracy of the nonboosted DEvo MLP was of 79.81%, 96.11%, and 27.07% in the same benchmarks. Two datasets for the experiments were gathered using a Muse EEG headband with four electrodes corresponding to TP9, AF7, AF8, and TP10 locations of the international EEG placement standard. The EEG MindBigData digits dataset was gathered from the TP9, FP1, FP2, and TP10 locations. (shrink)

It is widely apparent in our hyper-globalized world that the epistemologies, institutions, and practices underwriting it have reached a state of profound crisis. In the globalized world, everything is inevitably brought into proximity and correlation. Wars, natural disasters, climatic upheaval, nor political and economic turmoil, none of these can be effectively isolated, insulated, instituted, even immunized, as something apart, something that might be considered proper only to itself. This collected edition considers this crisis of the proper with a focus on (...) Italian political theorist Roberto Esposito’s work on community, immunity, and biopolitics. This collection introduces Esposito’s work to a wider English-speaking audience and provides many important contributions to the burgeoning scholarship on his political theory. Important international scholars working in this area examine and analyze his theory from a variety of perspectives, including those of biopolitics, feminism, political theory, the history of philosophy , property, community, and gift economies. The collection also includes previously untranslated essays by Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy. This collection will be of interest to those just discovering Esposito and for those who are already familiar with his work. This book was originally published as a Special Issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. (shrink)

This article enumerates several different possible construals of the idea that religion is owed respect. It asks: 1. how religion might be an object of respect; 2. what sorts of respect religion might command; and 3. whose respect might be at stake in complaints about and demands for religious recognition. By distinguishing various ways in which these questions can be interpreted, the discussion aims to introduce some clarity to a notoriously controversial and knotty area of public discussion. Although the article (...) does not propose any particular answer to the question ‘Does religion deserve our respect?’, it does urge that theorists give greater attention to the neglected way in which religions have a ‘public presence’ that engenders distinctive sorts of social respect. I suggest that the popularity among academic political theorists and philosophers of a ‘liberal’ paradigm emphasising the importance of freedom of conscience and ‘respect for persons’ has led them to ignore the implications of ‘public presence’ for debates over the place of religion in modern secular societies. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This article considers how Margaret Jane Radin’s theory of the feminist double bind can bring conceptual clarity to the difficulties feminisms face in engaging with political and legal institutions of global governance. I draw on her theory to reinitiate a conversation on ideal and nonideal theory, in order to answer the call of key proponents in international legal feminism to reevaluate methodologies in critiquing mainstream institutions. By providing an account of how to navigate the double bind, this article brings conceptual (...) clarity to the tension between resistance and compliance that has been argued to lie at the heart of the feminist project in international law. I demonstrate how this theoretical framework can foster greater pluralist perspectives in feminist engagement of ideal theories to temper the deradicalising and conservative risk of navigating feasibility constrained nonideal strategies. (shrink)